First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?
- Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
- Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
- Finally… reveal the book!
I was trying to find something really scary in honor of Halloween tomorrow and this was the book that kept coming to me. It is one of the most chilling opening lines I know of.
Can you guess what book this is?
Pretty chilling line isn’t it?
Would you believe it is a children’s book?
I’m serious!
It even won the Newbery Medal!
Have you guessed?
Well here it is…..
Here is what it is about:
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.
There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more.
But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks, for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod’s family.
This is still one of my favorite books. It truly is a wonderful read. If you really want a thrill though, listen to the audiobook. Neil Gaiman is the reader and he does a fabulous job, I just love his voice.
Confessions of a Serial Reader 